VBKÖ & CINENOVA in conversation, 5. 12. 2013

The VBKÖ (Vereinigung Bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs, http://www.vbkoe.org/) and Cinenova are two very different organisations with two very different histories and archives.
Nonetheless are our recent histories and near futures probably ventures, in which we share many problems and arguments. The Cinenova Working Group stems, among other things, out of a wish to stretch modes of representations and to work with the collection and not about it. The founding of the working group Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps (SKGAL http://www.skgal.org/), with its first project “THE MANY ARCHIVES!” at VBKÖ in 2012, works with a similar concept: a change in how history is distributed demands different narrative structures. With our practice today we also re-articulate claims of political movements and ask for their relevance for contemporary struggles. In the discussion we want to have a look at what we share and what we disagree in.

The Secretariat for Ghosts, Archival Politics and Gaps (SKGAL) / VBKÖ presents BLIND SPOT (1980) by Claudia von Alemann. The Secretariat’s interest lies in the film‘s focus on a historian who demonstrates that historical research can be an affective event of such intensity as to challenge the well-known contradiction: the insistence both that the past is unknowable and of the vitality of its remnants, as meagre as they might be. Considering sound as a non-linear historical tool, the film asks, what kind of historicism could take seriously the sonorous and affective event in order to lure out glimpses of pasts and futures becoming present.